Thursday, March 19, 2009

CSA week 15 - Grapefruit-coconut milk ice cream

And here we go. A pretty simple recipe this time around as all the citrus ice cream recipes I found were very straightforward and I decided to go with the suggestion. You wouldn't want to muddy the bright clean flavor of grapefruit with custard or cream cheese anyway.

Ingredients:
1/2 cup brown sugar
zest of 1 grapefruit
3 dashes cinnamon
2 dashes allspice
1 dash ginger
1 pinch salt
Process in food processor until fine-grained and uniform.
Then add
1/2 cup grapefruit supremes and juice
a few drops vanilla.
Blend until the sugar is well dissolved, add a little more grapefruit pulp for texture and chill.
I probably should have gotten a picture of this. Sorry.

Just before churning, mix with:
1 cup thick coconut milk
1 cup heavy cream
No reason to risk curdling by leaving the citrus with the dairy any longer than necessary.

I was afraid that without the custard or cornstarch this would freeze up solid, but it churned up nice and light without any problem.


The texture's quite good considering. It's smooth and creamy, but a little light as something more than half fruit products ought to be. The flavor, well, imagine taking a scoop of lightly flavored, slightly spicy coconut ice cream, and eating it with some grapefruit. The two components don't mesh; they're both just there. A bit of a disappointment there, but it's nothing you'd turn your nose up at unless you really hated grapefruit. Both elements are understated so it's easy eating but nothing really pops. That's not entirely a bad thing considering what you get when grapefruit pops.

But you know what would have really worked? If I had used lime instead, boosted the coconut flavor a bit and maybe included a little kaffir lime leaf as an exotic touch. Or if you want a crowd-pleaser, use key limes, replace the coconut milk with sweetened condensed milk and add crumbled pie crust.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Bill, what kind of ice cream maker/churner do you use? Now that mamey's coming back up, I'm looking to get a decent one...

billjac said...

It's a Cuisinart model I got at Williams-Sonoma, but it really doesn't work notably better than the $30 Deni churn I bought at Sears. Unless you want to spend the big bucks on something with a refrigeration unit, the thing to look for is the power of the motor and the sturdiness of the dasher. Once the dasher bends, and it will, you'll have to start periodically scraping down the sides of the bucket. If you have a weak motor, you'll have to do it while it's in motion because it won't be able to restart with a half thickened mix. If you have a more powerful motor, you'll be able to stop the churning but then you won't be able to judge doneness by the pitch of the motor's whine as it struggles to churn the stiff soft-serve. Mox nix, to my mind.